Lately there's been some discussion "behind the scenes" about splitting up Retrohackers in distinctive Users and Developers sections. The reason being that many Users (non-developers) come here looking for help and support but might feel hesistant to ask questions and gets scared off due to the strong Developer nature of this forum.

Until now I've been trying to apply "organic" means of evolving this forum, meaning changes come slowly and little by little. If we decide to do this, it would perhaps be as simple as putting one single combined "User support" section in there to begin with.

Before going any further I'd like to get the opinions from both you Users and Developers.......

No harm having a help section, but there is Lemon...

Probably a good idea, but it is likely to require more "admin" work, moving stuff around. Just take a look at the "DreamLoad MMC64" thread.. it's a big mish-mash of dev and user stuff.. But ok, I guess you'd need a relatively complete piece of software to avoid use related questions in a dev thread. There'll always be "grey" areas, i guess.. but a user section would help, well.. the users


I'd prefer asking my questions here first, since the people answering don't talk as much shit... I'd rather have NO answer, than a useless one... then I can always provide the answer myself, if I find it

..I'm not saying Lemon is completely full of shit, tho

Yeah, I think we absolutely need user areas. My original idea was User Forum, which would not be only limited to support matters, but open to all kinds of talk about using the various hardware.

Maybe that and a support forum for interaction between developers and users, where developers can tell users about their plans and users can post requests and give feedback on said plans and released stuffs?

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Commodore 128 Programmer
City of Kouvola, Finland

http://mydarkgothvampiricplace.endofthe ... Commodore/

Sounds logical to me "a user" as might keep the developers threads cleaner with less crosstalk more on the subject.

will get more users in here too nothing wrong with a bit of commodore chit chat as long as we keep it less Preditorial than lemon boy some get hot under the collar on there sometimes if you want to post a thread on a hotly debatable subject just turns in a flaming session.
more friendly in here.

Have Fun Shane

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Have Fun!!

If you are going to create separate sections, I think you should still allow Users read access to the Development section. Everyone likes to know what's going on and denying write access means we can discuss matters in the Users section.

Also... thank you for asking us and not just doing it

Absolutely. I don't think limiting access was ever even proposed. So, umm, Raveguru! Have you made a decision as to how to proceed?

Oh, and public discussion was my suggestion, so you're welcome.

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Commodore 128 Programmer
City of Kouvola, Finland

http://mydarkgothvampiricplace.endofthe ... Commodore/

Oh yes, I've been thinking. I have so many ideas and so little time

Right now I'm thinking about (as FMan suggested at some point) to open up just one User section where all kinds of questions can be made. Probably no need to split that up into different categories as well, or what do you think?

About write access, I was planing to not restrict anyone write access, or would that be bad perhaps? Until now not too many "user questions" have been flooding the forum. Hopefully a "User" section will be sufficiently self explaining ... or?



Well, my position is that I'm simply providing the tools for you to construct with. Without you guys this website would be just another dead and pointless forum in cyber space. So I trust it would be unwise to not consult its engineers with the building plans.

Damn! I should run for president

How would this split be achieved?

One idea would be to split up the forum into two, a "user forum" and a "developer forum". But maybe this is what you mean with a "section"? Separate sites would probably be a bad thing, since it'd make checking both more inconvenient...

Exactly. What I meant was adding just another Forum "Section" (it's referred to as "Cathegory" and "Forum" in phpBB). So between the "Ground Zero" and "Development" cathegories there would be a "Users" cathegory with just one "forum" named "Users questions & support" or something like that.

By the way, I will probably drop the "Cross development" forum since it's not being used much and topics regarding that can go under the "General" forum.